Jamie York gave this public lecture at the Washington Waldorf School in 2015 as part of a 2-day math workshop for teachers.
“How many times have you heard a student say in the middle of, perhaps, struggling through some math homework or something, ‘Why do I have to really learn this? Why do I have to learn this math?’ You can imagine what the answers typically are. If it’s not that ‘you’re going to need it to be successful in your life and your career, or managing your personal finances,’ it’s, ‘Well, this is something you’re going to need for college. At some point, you’re going to be studying something more interesting, and you’re going to need the math for it.’
The thing I’m really trying to point out here is I think there’s much more to math than just that. I was pointing towards this a moment ago with this need for math to be practical. I think in our society today, the purpose of math, really, we’re led to believe it’s something of a language or a skill that you’d use later. The implication is we’re told that math, in and of itself, isn’t meaningful. We achieve meaning through learning from mathematics by studying something else, and I disagree with that.“
In this video master teacher Jamie York presents his thoughts on the higher purpose of math, and how that question informs our approach to teaching and learning math.
He touches on building a solid foundation instead of accelerating students through AP courses and Calculus, mental math, the power of puzzles, struggle and not making math ‘easy’.
He culminates by addressing the higher purpose of math, developmentally for children. I encourage you to pour a cup of tea and spend 18 minutes with this thought-provoking lecture.
Here are a few teasers to get you excited about the lecture, where Jamie will get more in-depth.
- Math teaches us to think. I don’t mean in a rigid way, but an analytical, a creative kind of thinking, problem-solving.
- Math combats cynicism.
- Math teaches us how to struggle
- Math teaches us what it means to be human
And so as teachers, what we really want to be able to do, how we can teach math better, is to find ways to bring math so that it’s not just a blind procedure, so that there’s understanding behind what we’re doing, so that it’s an adventure, it’s discovery, and it’s struggle. Because struggle is good, and that seems radical in today’s world, doesn’t it? Because as parents and educators in this world today, it seems like more so than it had been in the past, am I maybe wrong? But it seems more than ever today, we don’t want our children to struggle. We want things to be easy, right? You see these textbooks out there, right? Making math easy, making this easy, making everything easy. And that’s not the point of math. We don’t want to just make it easy. We want there to be struggle. And yes, we want our students to work through that struggle. That’s important as well.
